Murder With Puffins(12)

Michael laughed, and Rob looked as insulted as if I'd impugned his character, instead of that of our late and little-lamented great-uncle. He pointedly buried his face in the album. Michael picked up another volume and began to flip through it.

"Don't you enjoy the albums, too?" he asked. "Seeing your face through history and all that?"

"I suppose I would, but apparently I look like Dad's side of the family," I said. "None of the pictures look much like me."

I didn't mention the other reason: that looking in the albums usually triggered a temporary but acute resurgence of the inferiority complex I'd fought all my life. Far too many of my female ancestors had been tall, thin, aristocratic blondes, like Mother, and the albums contained far too many pictures of them surrounded by the swarms of beautiful, wealthy, and sometimes famous men who'd courted them.

The album Michael had picked up, for instance. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that it held hundreds of photos from the late forties and early fifties, all neatly arranged and held in place with old-fashioned black paper photo corners. The early pictures, featuring the angelic preadolescent Mother, were bad enough. But looking at her at thirteen, when she'd already acquired a figure and a flock of admirers, I could feel myself fighting off those old feelings of inadequacy.

It helps a little that none of the men were as gorgeous as Michael is, I thought, looking fondly at him and curling a little closer. And that many of them ought not to have allowed themselves to be photographed in swimsuits, although I suppose I was applying today's fitness standards to bodies not considered unattractive fifty years ago. Perhaps the kind of lean, tanned, muscular body modern women consider attractive in a man would have been a dead giveaway, back in those more class-conscious times, that its owner earned his living from some kind of badly paid manual labor.

But still; seeing picture after picture of Mother surrounded by half a dozen obviously smitten men--well, it got depressing. And the occasional suitor whose face appeared a little too often, who always wangled a place right beside Mother in the group shots, who occasionally managed to ditch the crowd and have his picture taken with Mother, as a couple--for some reason, they made me anxious. I couldn't help wondering if but for some strange accident or other, she might have married one of them. And where would I be then?

"I think some of them have fallen out," Michael said, coming to a page with several empty sets of corners.

"More likely, they're pictures Mother considered unflattering," I said. The other nearby pictures were all of Mother posing in a two-piece bathing suit. While the suit looked demure enough by today's standards, I suspected that forty-odd years ago, it had been daring enough to give my grandfather conniption fits.

We stayed up for a while, looking at the albums--at least Rob and Michael were looking, and I was half-dozing against Michael's shoulder. Even after Rob yawned his way upstairs with an album under his arm, Mrs. Fenniman and Aunt Phoebe kept bustling in and out of the living room at frequent intervals to make sure Michael and I weren't getting ill. Michael finally said good night. He found about a dozen excuses to pop back downstairs when everything seemed quiet, but we finally gave up trying to find a few moments alone together and said an awkward good night, with Mrs. Fenniman at our elbows, pressing cough lozenges into our hands.

If I hadn't been doomed to spend the night on the sofa, I'd have felt very sorry for Michael. He was sharing with Rob what we referred to as "the children's room"--a former walk-in closet fitted with a set of rickety bunk beds half a foot too short for either of them. Far from ideal, but since no one could reasonably expect Aunt Phoebe or Mrs. Fenniman to scramble into an upper bunk, they were stuck with it.

I made a bed for myself on the less lumpy of the two living room sofas. But I didn't get to sleep right away. Mrs. Fenniman and Aunt Phoebe continued their culinary efforts until well past midnight. Either they planned to invite the whole island over very soon or they expected to be stranded for a very long time. Both prospects appalled me.

They kept trying to talk me into sleeping on a floor pallet in their room. Since Aunt Phoebe's snoring had helped inspire my flight from Yorktown, and Mrs. Fenniman was just as bad, I resisted their suggestions with every argument I could muster, including the pretense that I still felt dizzy from the ferry and didn't want to risk the stairs, which let me in for another round of foul-tasting herbal remedies.

They finally tramped up to bed, still arguing about whether Hurricane Maude or Hurricane Ethel had been the most devastating storm to hit the island in previous years. After another hour or so of people stumbling in and out of the bathroom, dropping their flashlights, barking their shins on things, and swearing with varying degrees of verbal ingenuity, the house finally settled down and I dropped off to sleep.